8 Quotes by Jo Guldi

A spectre is haunting our time: the spectre of the short term.

The longer you can look back the further you can look forward’, said a mid twentieth-century master of political power who was also a prolific historian, Winston Churchill.

The sword of history has two edges, one that cuts open new possibilities in the future, and one that cuts through the noise, contradictions, and lies of the past.

Reformers and revolutionaries also need the big picture. Generation upon generation of political reformers capitalised upon history to revisit the past, some of them radicals for whom the alternatives and counterfactuals of the past gave reason for the revolutionary reconception of institutions of democracy, race, and property ownership.

The world around us is clearly one of change, irreducible to models. Who is trained to steadily wait upon and translate them for others, these vibrations of deeper time?

It was during this period, we argue, that professional historians ceded the task of synthesising historical knowledge to unaccredited writers and simultaneously lost whatever influence they might once have had over policy to colleagues in the social sciences, most spectacularly to the economists.

History’s power to liberate, we argue, ultimately lies in explaining where things came from, tacking between big processes and small events to see the whole picture, and reducing a lot of information to a small and shareable version.

In the age of the permanent campaign, politicians plan only as far as their next bid for election. They invoke children and grandchildren in public speeches, but electoral cycles of two to seven years determine which issues prevail. The result is less money for crumbling infrastructure and schools and more for any initiative that promises jobs right now.